It’s snowed twice this winter. The first time was last week, which was basically just a dusting– a bit wetter than that, maybe, but nothing that was any big deal. It melted within a couple of days.

My neighbors, down the road, have a full-sized snowman in their front yard, and it’s been there for a week. At one point, it was completely surrounded with green grass since the rest of the snow had melted. It’s as tall as I am. It’s been snowing for the last day and a half or so, way more than the first time it snowed, and I still feel like there’s not enough snow on the ground to make a proper snowman. I don’t have any idea how they pulled this shit off; there are cul-de-sacs all over the place in the neighborhood so there are plenty of crossroads to sell your soul to the Devil at, but it seems like a snowman is maybe not the best use of that transaction.

I’m this close to knocking on their door and asking them how the hell they did it. I’d speculate about some sort of snow-packed-onto-a-giant-kids’-ball thing, but I’m no more certain that’s possible than building a snowman out of no snow.

Explain this to me, someone.

I’ve spent my weekend playing The Witcher 3 and reading. Neither is going well. I just bailed on Ada Palmer’s Too Like the Lightning, which is as openly convinced of its own cleverness– the narrator literally brags about it– as anything I’ve ever read in my life. I know people who would probably really like it, and I’m not sure I’d bother arguing with someone who loved it, but it’s one of those “not for me” things. I’ve had bad things to say about the Witcher in the past, but the huge number of accolades it’s continued to receive and a sale over Black Friday weekend where the game and both its DLC expansions went on sale for less than twenty bucks managed to catch my attention.

And as of right now? Meh. It’s keeping my attention– it’s not terrible, by any means, but I’m going to lose interest before I finish it. I slaughtered a bunch of guards at one point for making a rape joke. It’s that kind of game.

Diving into Michael J. Sullivan’s The Death of Dulgath next, which ought to hit the spot. It ain’t gonna be art, but I don’t really need that from my fantasy. And I’ll keep playing Witcher until either the next rape joke or the combat gets boring; we’ll see what happens first.

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I just went back and looked, and the last day I completely failed to post anything at all was December 23rd, 2014. That’s nearly two goddamn years of at least once-a-day posting, and at most only 70% of it has been garbage.

I don’t wanna ever hear nothin’ from any of y’all again about any pansy little one month challenges.

That said, once I post on December 23rd, 2016, I’m taking the rest of the damn year off. I keep getting to the end of the day, lately, and going “Okay, enough. This is the day I skip,” and then writing something like this.

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Yesterday at work: a $2,000 return on an insanely slow day. I have like eight sales but the biggest one is for less than a hundred and fifty dollars so it doesn’t amount to shit.

Today at work: a $4,000 return, and I still haven’t dug myself out of yesterday’s hole, plus it’s Tuesday, so there’s two trucks in the morning and then lots and lots of phone calls to people whose stuff has arrived and then spending the rest of the day answering the phone and in a progressively worse and worse mood because you’re leaving detailed messages for these fuckwits and they’re calling without listening to their fucking voicemail and saying things like “Uh, yeah, I got a call from this number?” and then trailing off.

LISTEN. TO. YOUR. FUCKING. VOICEMAIL. YOU. FUCKING. CRETIN.

I’m gonna go off on somebody sooner or later, goddammit. If I answer the phone and say “Thanks for calling <furniture store>, this is Luther, may I help you?” then maybe the phone call might be about furniture? Did you even hear that, moron?

And then I got home and had an angry letter from the Illinois Department of Revenue wondering why I hadn’t filed my taxes in September. Because I haven’t set foot in Illinois since July, maybe? Or earned any income? And don’t taxes get filed in April, and what is this September shit? That could be why.

OH SHIT RIGHT also half the staff got written up because the store had too few prospects last month. That was fun too!

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I haven’t heard any buzz about this program at all, and only found out about it because I was scrolling through Netflix menus pretty much at random– any of you Netflix folks watching 3%? We’re only three episodes in, so consider this a conditional recommendation, but so far my lovely wife and I are both finding the show to be pretty compelling science fiction. The disadvantage: it’s dubbed from Portuguese, so when I say things like “the acting is good,” which is a thing I’d say about this show, what I basically mean is that the actors look like they’re acting well, and the English speakers they’ve hired to overdub their voices usually don’t suck that much.

The premise, so far: it is The Future, and The Future appears to really suck for everyone who lives in what I assume is still called Brazil. Each year everyone who turns 20 is eligible to take a series of tests that only the titular 3% will pass. Those who pass are able to go to “the Offshore,” which…

…well, none of them seem to know what the Offshore is, they just really really hope it’s better than the shit dystopia they live in now, and no scenes have been set in the Offshore yet, so the viewers don’t have any idea either. So, really Hunger Gamesy, but done pretty well. Three episodes in, we’re still all testing, and the tests have been varied and interesting enough to keep us watching. If this is what the entire first season is about, it might be a problem, but so far? So good.

Anybody else watching this? If not, anybody want to start so I have someone to talk to about it?